What Aegis has paid creators, and new guides to Content ID

For years our home page said "We've paid over $1 million to rights holders". It was true, but stale. We passed $1 million in December 2020, and the sentence never moved after that.

The home page now shows the real figure, from our payout records, and says how we count it. While we were rewriting the site, we also wrote down answers to the questions creators send us most.

What Aegis has paid creators

As of September 2026, Aegis has paid creators $3.0M+ since our first Content ID payout in 2017, to 160+ creators in 40 countries.

The figure has its own page, Creators paid, with a chart of the running total month by month and a section on how we count it. In short:

• What counts. Every payout to a creator for YouTube Content ID revenue that reached their payment account, after Aegis's revenue share.
• What doesn't. Payouts that failed, were returned or are still pending. Payments to agencies, which pay their own creators. Referral commissions.
• Rounding. We round down to two significant figures. The "+" means the real figure is higher.

Creators are paid after YouTube finalizes a month, so money earned in the last few weeks isn't in the total yet. We update the page once a month, after the payout run, and it always says which month the figures are as of.

The same figure is now the heading of our home page in all ten languages, with the creator and country counts under it. A link there leads to the method, so you can check what's behind the number.

It is a total for all creators together. It tells you nothing about what one channel will earn, which depends on how much of your content is reused and how many people watch the copies. The FAQ on the page says the same.

New guides

We also started a Guides section: plain answers to the copyright and Content ID questions creators ask us. Each guide links to YouTube's own Help pages and shows when we last checked it.

• Someone re-uploaded my video on YouTube. What can I do? Your three options: ask the uploader, file a copyright removal request, or claim it with Content ID.
• How to get YouTube Content ID as an independent creator Who YouTube gives Content ID to directly, and how independent creators get it through a Content ID service.
• Content ID for musicians and producers Getting your music into Content ID, and what to check with your distributor first.
• Content ID for streamers What Content ID can and can't claim from the clip channels that reupload your streams.
• Content ID for podcasts What Content ID can claim when clip pages re-upload your show.

Some guides are also in Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. The rest are in English for now.

Where to find them

Both are linked from the footer of every page, as Creators paid and Guides. If a guide leaves a question open, ask us through the contact form, and it may become the next guide.